‘The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,’ Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. ‘We were just wrong.’
‘The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,’ Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. ‘We were just wrong.’
There’s just a lot of stuff going on and everybody can make an argument for knowing something:
And so on. It’s all true, but you only have so many hours in a day, and everybody has a different life. You could live in the most affluent society and be dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with computers.
Also, who decides what’s “basic knowledge”? I know a lot about software, what I know about hardware is minimal. What’s minimal to me though might be advanced to another and vice versa.
We should be trying to be more empathetic. Recommending an advanced Linux OS to a newbie isn’t empathetic. Expecting a user to know how to install an OS isn’t empathetic.
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I agree, I don’t think everyone needs to know how to use niche CLI utilities or minimalistic tiling WMs. I do think you should be able to easily navigate a windows-like UX such as Mint.
No, I think that’s about where the average persons knowledge should end. The fact that the average person doesn’t know this is exactly the issue I’m getting at.
Re-installing an OS is easy, It’s like knowing how to change a tire, or check your oil. Booting off of a USB stick and clicking next a dozen times isn’t hard.
Hmmm, this is where our opinions diverge. It’s easy when things go right. UEFI and MBR changed that. And I’ve had a few linux installations fail for obscure reasons (mostly hardware support).
Installers also say “backup your data” but if you’re coming from windows, what do you do when your stuff is on onedrive? What if you know nothing about partitioning and the installer just wipes the entire disk clean even though you expected your D:/ with your backup to be kept?
Oh, an should you keep that windows recovery partition? What’s on there? How do you access the data to check?
There are a bunch of things to consider when installing to prevent data-loss and IMO they aren’t as straightforward as they seem.
Doing a regular system update or upgrading from one LTS release to another are comparable to oil-check and changing a tire. Installing an OS, IMO, not so much.
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